Skills: hard budget limit (5440 chars) with no exclude/disable mechanism causes mass description truncation

[lz-lunzi]

Environment

• Codex: v0.133.0
• OS: macOS 26.5 (25F71)
• Model: auto (9router)

Problem

Codex unconditionally loads ALL skills from multiple directories with a hard budget limit of 5440 chars (~2% context window). No config option to exclude or disable unwanted skills. When skill count exceeds ~20, mass description truncation occurs.

Evidence

From ~/.codex/log/codex-tui.log:

truncated skill metadata to fit skills context budget
  budget_limit=5440
  total_skills=119
  included_skills=119
  omitted_skills=0
  truncated_description_chars_per_skill=232
  truncated_skill_descriptions=103

Root Cause

1. Unconditional multi-directory scan — Codex scans ~/.codex/skills/, ~/.codex/skills/.system/, and ~/.agents/skills/ with no filter
2. No exclude/ignore config — config.toml has no [skills] section, no mechanism to disable unwanted skills
3. .system/ auto-restore — imagegen, plugin-creator, skill-creator, skill-installer, openai-docs auto-restore on every launch, cannot be permanently removed
4. Budget too small — 119 skills × ~232 chars = 103/119 descriptions truncated

Expected

• skills.exclude = [...] or skills.include = [...] in config.toml
• Per-skill enabled = false override
• Option to disable .system/ skill auto-restore
• OR dynamic budget that scales with context window size

Impact

Truncated descriptions make skills undiscoverable — agent cannot understand what most skills actually do. Users with many skills (agent frameworks, integrations) are hardest hit.

[github-actions]

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

• Project-level config should support disabling global/user skills while preserving repo skills #24237

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